Research firm Nielsen chimed in today with a survey that puts Apple as the leading handset maker in the United States whilst Android is portrayed as the top mobile operating system in the country. Those findings follow a recent analysis which had Apple overtaking Nokia to become the world’s leading smartphone vendor in July, also corroborated by IDC figures. According to Nielsen’s June data, Google’s Android remains the nation’s top phone platform with a 39 percent of the country’s consumer smartphone market. Apple’s iOS follows with 28 percent and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion continues to bleed share, down to 20 percent in the second quarter of 2011. Windows Mobile and Windows Phone combined grabbed nine percent, webOS and Palm OS were barely a blip with two percent, as was Nokia’s dying Symbian OS.

Apple on the other hand is the top smartphone maker in the United States that controls 28 percent of the market (excluding iPods and iPads). That’s partly “because Apple is the only company manufacturing smartphones with the iOS operating system”, Nielsen argues. HTC shares second spot with Research In Motion with a fourteen percent share of Android devices and six percent of Windows Phones for a total of 20 percent share of the whole market, same as the BlackBerry maker. HTC is also the nation’s leading Android and Windows Phone vendor with 14 percent and six percent share, respectively. No wonder Apple is suing HTC and seeking to ban import of their phones into the US…

Surprisingly, Samsung is the #3 maker of Android devices in the United States with an eight percent share of devices. Motorola placed second with an eleven percent share of Android devices. Samsung also controls two percent of Windows Phones sold in the country. However, some expect Samsung will knock Apple off the top spot and become the world’s leading smartphone maker when it reports its earnings tomorrow. Apple beat Nokia when it announced second-quarter iPhone sales of 20.3 million units versus Nokia’s 34 percent decline in shipments to 16.7 million units. Blame it on the Symbian boycott by carriers and Nokia’s new CEO Stephen Elop whom analyst Tomi Ahonen, called incompetent, saying Elop will “go down in history as the notorious and misguided name that destroyed the best-known brand on the planet”. Ahonen, also an ex-Nokia engineer, portrays this as “management stupidity in the scale of Coca-Cola’s 1985 launch of New Coke”.